IRS Now Robo-audits Your Spending

These are the types of invasive tax maneuvers that boiled the blood of our Founding Fathers. But there’s still a way out of all our Internal Revenue Service wars and woes.

U.S. News & World Report highlighted some more encroaching news this past week in the article “IRS High-Tech Tools Track Your Digital Footprints.”

The IRS is “collecting a lot more than taxes this year,” the report explained. “It’s also acquiring a huge volume of personal information on taxpayers’ digital activities, from eBay auctions to Facebook posts and, for the first time ever, credit card and e-payment transaction records.”

It added, “The agency reveals little about how it will employ its vast, new network scanning powers … sweeping changes being implemented with little public discussion or clear guidelines.”

Edward Zelinsky, a tax law expert and a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and Yale Law School, explained that taxpayers should understand that whatever they say and do electronically can and will be used against them in IRS enforcement.

And what is the IRS’ official response to its gargantuan Big Brother violation of our personal lives?

No comment.

But Dean Silverman, senior adviser to the IRS commissioner and the head of data analytic efforts at the IRS through the Office of Compliance Analytics, explained last year in a speech to insiders at the Predictive Analytics World for Government conference that the new system will “improve voluntary compliance.” (Interpretation of “improve voluntary compliance”: bully and threaten citizens into submission.)

Silverman also boasted in trade publications about the IRS’ new intrusive monetary reconnaissance: “Private industry would be envious if they knew what our models are.”

The last thing American citizens need is more government regulation and overreach into our private lives, pocketbooks, electronic banking and credit card purchases.

by Sir John Hawkins

John Hawkins's book 101 Things All Young Adults Should Know is filled with lessons that newly minted adults need in order to get the most out of life. Gleaned from a lifetime of trial, error, and writing it down, Hawkins provides advice everyone can benefit from in short, digestible chapters.

What we need now more than ever is not a new electronic way of monitoring taxes or even a complete overhaul of our run-amok taxation bureaucracy. What we need is to shut down the IRS and initiate the FairTax.

The IRS is an unconstitutional system that has no checks and balances; it can’t be held accountable to the people, who posses the real power in our republic. Moreover, the present tax code penalizes productivity and cripples entrepreneurs and our capitalist economy. And it is inequitable and unfair in its implementation.

As The Heritage Foundation and countless watchdog organizations have reported, the top 10 percent of income earners pay 70 percent of income taxes, while more than a third of U.S. households pay no income taxes — and 47 percent pay no federal taxes.

It’s time we had a system through which people didn’t have to figure out ways to cheat or even wade through 66,000 burdensome pages of IRS codes in order to save their own money. And the FairTax is that system.

The FairTax is a simple consumption-based tax system, in which equity would rule and no one could dodge his dues. With the FairTax, the harder you worked and the more money you made the better off you and our economy would be. You would pay taxes only when you bought something, which means that you could control how much you’d be taxed and that you never would be penalized inequitably for working hard.

Another huge plus about the FairTax: It would bring back to the U.S. economy trillions of dollars hiding in offshore accounts, which would give a monumental boost to our economy. As Mike Huckabee, my friend and the former governor of Arkansas, has said, “the FairTax is a completely transparent tax system. It doesn’t increase taxes. It’s revenue-neutral. But here’s what it will do: It will bring business back to the United States that is leaving our shores because our tax laws make it impossible for an American-based business to compete. … The FairTax was designed by economists from Harvard and Stanford and some of the leading think tanks across the country.”

The FairTax would be the biggest stimulation package ever. As it says on FairTax.org, “think of it as the world’s biggest economic jumper cables.” (Of course, the FairTax rate would have to be palatable with or even incorporate state taxes, too.)

And there’s one last benefit worthy of noting here. As Huckabee has often asked, “wouldn’t it be nice if April 15 were just another sunny spring day?”